Category Archives: Reviews

Avishai Cohen’s Quartet Addresses Dark Times on ‘Ashes to Gold’ and at the Outpost on March 21

Avishai Cohen. Photo by Daniella Feijoo.

The latest release from Avishai Cohen’s quartet, Ashes to Gold, eloquently expresses the breadth and depth of raw emotions provoked by the atrocities of October 7, 2023, and the tragedies of the ensuing war. Its heart-piercing five-part title suite gives voice to anger, horror, grief, tenderness, and a glimmer of determined hope, driven home by virtuosic performances. On March 21, Albuquerque will have the opportunity to hear the quartet—with Cohen (trumpet, flugelhorn, flute), Yonathan Avishai (piano), Barak Mori (bass), and Ziv Ravitz (drums)—live at the Outpost, part of the quartet’s first U.S. tour in five years.

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Altered States: the Music of Yosef Gutman & Peter Broderick, and of Scanner & Neil Leonard

Music, like love, has the capacity for altering your consciousness, your brain chemistry. These two releases—River of Eden, from Yosef Gutman and Peter Broderick, and The Berklee Sessions, from Scanner and Neil Leonard, each of which got past me in 2024, have the capacity to do just that, and they do it in completely different fashions, acoustically and electronically, respectively.

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The Ear-Opening Sound from The Fury

The Fury at Ornithology (l2r): Mark Turner, Matt Brewer (rear), Lage Lund, Tyshawn Sorey.

My long winter’s nap was blessedly interrupted by the new release from The Fury, Live in Brooklyn. This quartet, comprising heavyweights Mark Turner (tenor sax), Lage Lund (guitar), Matt Brewer (bass), and Tyshawn Sorey (drums), offers up next-level jazz that produces continual astonishment.

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Pianist Leslie Pintchik Emerges from Challenging Times with Moving Music

Leslie Pintchik

With Prayer for What Remains, her first release since 2019, pianist Leslie Pintchik once again, with the assistance of her deeply connected bandmates, delivers engaging music notable as much for its intelligence as its emotional eloquence and scope.

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New Music from Friends Old and New

Old friends Edward Simon, Scott Colley, and Brian Blade have reformed their trio for Three Visitors, their lyrical new jazz album, and a new friend, French-Dominican-Canadian pianist Thélonius García, offers an often captivating solo recording, Marche Nocturne, in more of a classical outing.

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